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I know plenty of women who gave birth to their first child when they were 19 years old and got married when they were 18-19 years old. In secular society, these religious Jewish women are counted among statistics of pregnant teenage women. If this is the norm in the frum community, how could teenage pregnancy still be such a major problem in the secular community? Clearly, their statistics, all though accurate, do not represent our cultural norms as influencing factors that led to the statistics of teenage pregnancy being so high.
If you are doing sociological research on the “problem” of teenage pregnancy, you probably should exclude women who were married nine months prior to giving birth, since the problem group is limited to what is typical among the non-religious populations, namely unmarried girls who became pregnant while unmarried and (presumably) by “accident” (which is what the sociologists claim, though some dispute that).
There are not that many frum people, and there are not that many frum girls who get married AND have kids at nineteen. I have two cousins who got married at nineteen and neither one is a “teen mom” (one doesn’t yet have kids, one just had a baby at 21). The chances of frum people skewing the statistics is very, very small.
Sure let’s say you know ten people like that (and that’s just you- I’m sure there are more)- however, according to the CDC, 329,797 live births were recorded for girls ages 15-19. There is NO WAY that a couple thousand frum girls are skewing the data.
(The number of teen pregnancies in the US is actually shrinking by many percentage points a year, interestingly enough- over the past 20 years, the rate has dropped by 20% and the number is at its lowest point since records began to be kept.)
Writersoul- You are forgetting that in chassidish communities it is the norm to get married at 18 and have a baby around a year later…
fkelly,
It’s still not enough to change the statistics, but if you’re worried about it, sure, I’m all for having people wait until their adults before marrying and having a baby.
fkelly: Still definitely not enough to change the statistics.
We are a bigger minority than we think we are, living inside of the community as we do.
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